Busking In Cyberland - Everywhere is Next Door

[wyld_dandelyon]

One of the secrets of busking, if you want to earn your dinner or pay some bills, is to find a good corner. Somewhere that the merchants won’t chase you away, where you and your audience won’t block traffic, and where people who like your special style of music will hear you. If you sing French folk songs, it probably won’t be effective to stand

Comments

[red_trillium]

I have a counter at my Cafe Press shop, it tells me how many returning/unique visitors visit. But the prob with putting it on LJ I think would be it might only count visitors to your profile page, not your journal entries, so that wouldn't help. There's a lot at Cafe Press on keywords, being found, SOE (Search Engine Optimisation) but if you Google Search Engine Optimisation you might find some stuff.

Options would be posting in as many places as you can: Twitter, Dreamwidth, Myspace, Facebook, Livejournal, etc. mentioning Fireborn. That does two things: Gets your book out to potential audiences (but you do need to have some different friends at each, not just the same people in all) and it also gets the name of the book to search engines (see above about SOE, you do need to sign up/put your book in them to start).

I had a thought yesterday. When you finish Fireborn, what about making a *physical* book. You can put the special "subscriber" info into it to make it more appealing and sell it somewhere like Cafe Press or Lulu, link to it here and/or Twitter, etc. Cafe Press will pay by check, Lulu I think pays by Paypal. The info on books on CP isn't as obvious as some of the other items so here's the link: Cafe Press Book help. I use CP for my photo items, have used it about a year. I like their other items well enough and haven't had too many problems with them (the rare issue with quality, but that's a given with Print On Demand websites & they were good about rectifying it). They don't do colour books or I would have used them instead of Blurb for mine.

It's not ideal but it would give you something for now, until you can find a publisher. I think Lulu lets you buy ISBN codes so you can also market your books to small bookstores in your home town or sell them on Amazon and stuff (they don't let you buy ISBNs for photobooks since they don't allow text in photobooks).

Just some brain storming....

[wyld_dandelyon]

One thing I'd love is to get a Wikipedia entry. It wouldn't have to be long. I'm not sure if that is best left until I have the book done? I did look up Fireborn in Wikipedia--there's an RPG by that name that I'd never heard of. Shouldn't be an issue, since Fireborn came from the millieu of my book, which is quite different from what I saw described for the game.

When it's finished, I intend to look into the possibility of a physical book. Right now, I'm focusing more on stuff like posting to Twitter & Facebook whenever I put something up. And building a Twitter following. And I found a cool thing - #fridayflash on twitter. And writing other stuff. And adding to my collection of rejection e-mails.

Oh--this reminds me I didn't put the #fridayflash story note up on Facebook. I should go do that.

[red_trillium]

I think the Wiki would be best after it is finished. That way you'll have something for people to give a good read of. And if they are publisher types then you'll have the finished manuscript to offer them.

You've got it all full on. :) I'd buy a physical Fireborn when it was all done. :) And I had a thought today, when you do cross that bridge, get stickers (or print on your computer) with the website address the book is on or your LJ/Twitter/Facebook address and/or username, buy a couple copies yourself and donate them to a library, high school, somewhere like that and put the stickers in them. That would get people reading the stories, interested in them and bring them in for other stories you are writing.

I haven't read the Friday Flash yet, I've got the tab open to check it out later.